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John Fry, a 54-year-old resident of the leafy and exclusive suburb of Bryn Mawr, steps out of his pickup truck onto the sun-scorched corner of 33rd and Mount Vernon streets and stands in his sober black suit at the foot of a three-story tall mural painted on the blank side of a row house. It is a portrait of local legend Herman Wrice.

Wrice was a big man with a bigger personality. Brought to Mantua as a child by his mother, he was a gang member as a youth but eventually quit, going on to found a social service program he called the Young Great Society and later leading Mantua Against Drugs, a group renowned for its fearless confrontations with neighborhood dealers. Wearing MAD’s signature white hardhat, Wrice not only wielded a bullhorn to lead chants during anti-drug rallies, he was known to carry a sledgehammer to bust down the doors of drug houses. On the night before an anti-drug march in 2001, he died of a heart attack at the age of 61.

Fry is soft-spoken and physically unimposing, but he has a reputation for being strongly determined and quietly persuasive, and he possesses his own set of tools—things like tax increment financing and discretionary budgeting power—whose use might very well alter the fortunes of Mantua in ways that Wrice could never have imagined.

And Mantua’s fortunes are in urgent need of alteration. High-tone name notwithstanding (the original Mantua was the home of the Roman poet Virgil), the area of trash-strewn empty lots and rundown brick houses has long been an unsolvable blot on the Philadelphia map, separated from the city’s grand Museum of Art district by the Schuykill River and a swath of commuter railroad tracks. Long ago carved out of what had once been part of the estate of one of the country’s first federal judges, Mantua by the mid-20th century had become a stable home for working-class homeowners when white flight and urban decay turned it into a center of black poverty. By 1970, the area was almost completely African American, and most of its residents made half as much money each year as the average Philadelphian. By the ‘80s and ‘90s, Mantua was besieged by drug dealers, gangs and the crime that accompanied them. “You could see the devastation,” says one long-time resident. Those who could get out, did; over the last several decades, Mantua’s population declined by 50 percent.

Enter John Fry, who, almost from the day he assumed the presidency of nearby Drexel University in 2010, has made it his mission, and the mission of the school’s 26,000 students, to be what he called “the most civically engaged university in the nation.” And that very much involves the audacious task of reinventing Mantua, whose sketchy row houses and abandoned storefronts lie just minutes from the university’s compact urban campus.

None of this is charity, exactly. Gone are the days when urban schools walled themselves off as citadels of learning and allowed neighborhoods to decay around them. When Columbia kids stuck to a few blocks in Harlem and Yalies created another reality from the urban dystopia of New Haven. At the University of Pennsylvania, where Fry worked before Drexel, the Ivy League kids so feared crossing the campus’ western border that they called the McDonald’s there “McDeath”; no more. “There is a greater appreciation that a university’s fortunes reflect the place in which they are situated,” says Bruce Katz, urban expert at the Brookings Institution. To pull in the kind of faculty and students Fry needed to accelerate Drexel’s long transformation from a local technical school to a nationally ranked research powerhouse, he knew he had to do nothing less than transform its entire surroundings. He would need the skills not just of an ivory-tower academic but of a latter-day Robert Moses, imagining a new neighborhood amid the shards of the old.

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Looking to invent new job opportunities for his university’s neighbors, Fry has announced ambitious development projects aimed at making Drexel’s piece of the University City area of Philadelphia—which also includes the University of Pennsylvania, several major hospitals and the country’s oldest urban scientific research park—into what is being branded an “Innovation Neighborhood.” Though that idea is still very much in the brochure stage, it has garnered national press for Fry and his vision to create a $2 billion center for high-tech entrepreneurial and educational partnerships just a short walk from an area better known for gangland shootings and drug deals.

Fry is well aware that it will require a long and difficult feat of engineering to build a figurative bridge between the shiny, high-tech “Innovation Neighborhood” of his imagining and the gritty corner in Mantua where Herman Wrice stares down from the painted brick wall with a look of protective menace over an area best known for gangland shootings and drug deals.

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Wrice looks south toward Drexel, where the yearly undergraduate tuition of $43,135 is well more than twice the annual income in most of the homes around him. A few blocks away from the mural, Fry idled his truck recently in front of Mantua’s neighborhood school, Morton McMichael, a chronic underperformer that was recently set to be closed, but was given a reprieve thanks in part to intervention from Drexel’s school of education. Having run through four principals in three years, McMichael was a place where fewer than one in five 7th graders could read at grade level, and where discipline was so bad that teachers feared assaults not just from students, but from their parents as well.

Still, “I like to think of this as, like, the Corner of Hope,” the relentlessly sunny Fry tells me. “Right here in Mantua. Because we have a school that could be turned around. We have a recreation center that is very well used and well loved. We have some new Philadelphia Housing Authority housing.”

John Marchese is a New York-based journalist and author, most recently, of The Violin Maker: A Search for the Secrets of Craftsmanship, Sound and Stradivari. He contributes regularly to Philadelphia Magazine.